She turned on me with her eyes and said that was exactly what happened to victims of all crimes, they were made to feel responsible for the injustice that was done to them.
I’m not saying that, Úna.
That’s what being a victim is, Liam, you feel it’s your own fault.
Let go the injustice, that’s all I’m saying.
We don’t have the right to let go, she said. How are we going to change anything if we don’t remember?
I don’t want to be a victim, I said.
You think you have a choice, Liam? Is that it? You think people can just decide whether they want to be a victim or not? It’s just a lifestyle thing, is that what you’re saying? Look at you. You haven’t come out all that well either, have you? Just take a look at yourself, Liam. You’re a mess. That’s what you are.
A mess.
She knew that was out of order. I was waiting for her to put it right, to say that everybody was a mess, not just me, all of us, herself included, but she said nothing and neither did I. She put her finger into the yoghurt carton and began twirling it around. Then she licked her finger and looked straight out the window at the mountains.
I walked out. I didn’t even care if we remained friends after that. I was having nothing more to do with her. I couldn’t be arsed to go and listen to her speaking in public, but then she phoned me to apologize.
Liam, I’m really sorry, she said.
She said I was not a mess. She said I was anything but a mess and I was absolutely right about everything.
I’m full of self-pity sometimes, she said. I don’t know why I’m like this. I keep losing all my friends. That’s why nobody likes me, she said, I’m so obsessed with myself. I can only remember what was done to me. Please, Liam, I’m sorry. You’re the only friend I have left.
Which was not strictly true, she had friends everywhere. But we made up, sort of. You know the way it is, you take a person good and bad. Like she was taking me good and bad. We were good and bad together, you could say.
I went to see her on stage after all, in front of a massive audience. This is Aspen, not Ennis, we’re talking about, so they came from all over America to listen to her. And you know what, nothing changed, she said the same things all over again, word for word. She spoke even more forcefully, like she had only been rehearsing it with me in her room. She spoke like a woman who had never been given a chance to speak before and she was going to leave nothing unsaid this time. It felt as though she was looking straight at me and I was left with no right to reply. You could hear her inhaling. You could hear her mouth clicking. She said the loneliest person in the world was the person who could not tell their own story. And that’s how it was for her before she began to write her memoir. She said you become locked into your own silence and it’s like not being alive at all any more. Until you write the story down and claim your own life back and stop being at the mercy of what happened to you.
I was at the mercy, she said.
She spoke about Don Carlo. She said she had seen it lately at the Met in New York. It was fabulous, she said. It was like the story of her own family. She said her father was just like the King, obsessed with his own power and his own fame around Dublin. Her father had no love for his son. Her mother had no love for herself because she became an alcoholic. As children they went to school with no love. Her little brother was the biggest casualty of all that. He was our Don Carlos, she said. My little brother, Jimmy.
She said love had to be passed on to you as a child. You see your reflection in a child’s eyes. There is nothing in the world better than hearing a child laugh, nothing makes you happier than seeing food going into a child’s mouth, she said. How could they send a boy out into the world with no love in him?
My brother, my reflection, she said.
You could hear the audience listening. You could feel them getting angry on her behalf, crying with her. You could sense them leaning forward and agreeing with her, that a person has to have love inside them to receive it, otherwise love would have no reason to come looking for you. You could feel every mother in the place wondering if they had something to answer for, some moment where they had withheld love from a child. Everything they had done or not done, without knowing what they had done. Fathers too, like myself. That fear of looking back and wondering what could have been done differently, even when it’s already too late.
She thanked the audience for listening to her life and bowed her head. And then, the big surprise came at the end, she sang a song. As she said herself afterwards, she murdered the song. It was all breathy and full of laughing, full of inhaling and coughing and lifting her voice up, as if she had to stand on a chair to get the notes down. It was a song about emigration. Everybody loved it. She forgot the words halfway through. All you could hear was her breathing up and down, like she was keeping the beat going. Then she remembered the words again and carried on all the way to the end, until her lungs were completely empty.
We’re heading to the Botanic Garden and I get this mad phone call from Dublin. She has to listen to me saying hold it, Gerry, hold it. I’m with somebody. I’m in Berlin. She can hear me telling him that I’m not in the least bit interested in going to a school reunion, it’s probably the last thing in the world I want to do. You can forget it. But they’re all depending on me to be there, so he’s saying, as if they can’t have a school reunion without me. I tell him he can count me absent, but then he continues trying to persuade me by reminding me of some of the funny things that happened at school. Do I remember the two Kenny brothers and one of them had a big birthmark on his forehead, they used to call him Star Trek. Yeah. Hilarious. This is exactly the kind of stuff I don’t want to hear about. I don’t want to hear about the Lynch brothers either and how one of them is bald now working in the Pidgeon House power plant, or was he always bald, he asks, which is a ridiculous question, how could he be bald at school? I don’t want to hear another word, so I end the call as quickly as possible and she wants to know what’s going on.
You need friends, she says, why not meet your old pals from school?
Why not? I’ll tell you why not.
Don’t be like me, she says.
She knows I don’t like looking back. She knows I’m always trying to put things behind me. She knows I’m trying to forget as much as possible, particularly things you can do nothing about. She says I’m still allowing my father to make my decisions for me. She says all my relationships with other men are copies of my relationship with my father. My father will be around for all eternity if I go on like this, she says, the world is full of men who are my father in disguise.
Be yourself, Liam, she says.
I’m not sure what Manfred thinks of all this talk going on inside his car and if he’s the kind of person who keeps driving and not listening to what his passengers are saying to each other, or whether he hears it all and is only pretending to be the driver.
I tell her that I have no intention of going to a school reunion. Myself and my brother both wore the same coloured jumpers, given to us by my father, identical. They couldn’t tell us apart. They thought I was my brother. They beat him up thinking it was me. I used to hate my brother not standing up for himself. I hated him because I loved him. I loved him and I hated him and now I love him even more because I had to pretend he was not my brother.
There is absolutely no way that I’m going to spend thirty euros on a dinner in the Camden Hotel, sitting down with those savages, pretending it’s all in the past. Even if it is in the past. The reunion of savages. Everybody laughing like savages and talking about how far they’ve come up in the world and how we’re not savages any more.
Calm down, Liam. You’re in Berlin.
I am calm.
She